Ransom X

by I.B. Holder

  Chapter 47 Shopping Spree

  There were only 17 shopping hours left until the broadcast television airwaves would become a vast multi-channel department store from which one item would be marked for theft. Blue would turn on the TV at precisely 4 pm Eastern and watch for three and a half hours, and his range would span every channel on the dial. Even with the seeming impossibility of his task, Legacy felt like a predator on a silent trajectory to run down his unseen prey. His senses had boxed Blue into a vast area of internal consistency he refereed to as his repetitive tendencies, and if he behaved like Legacy knew he would – there was a chance to take the whole group of them down. Legacy knew something that no one else knew, and that gave his vision a clarity that no one else could see.

  In examining a human face, the study of biometrics breaks down a face along an axis. The symmetry, or lack thereof, is expressed on a grid with the long axis crossing between the eyes and the lateral cutting just beneath the nose. It forms a ‘T’ down the midline of the face. Some of the more jovial scientists in the field call this simply “The Truth”. The truth be told, most expressions can be mapped on the same grid, it is the way that scientists eventually hope to allow robots to analyze the emotions of the humans. “Forget having an psycho-analyst when that happens.” Legacy thought, making his way down an unfamiliar corridor toward an exit from the office that he’d never used in all of his time at the Alexandria branch. It faced west and his home was east, but today Legacy was not taking his regular lunch. Instead, he was heading across town. He looked at the faces in the crowds that passed him, trying to picture them in monochrome and then recreate the victims within everyone. The same associations he’d seen so clearly in his office.

  Computer software actually bleeds out the colors to make the ‘T’ grid more pronounced and this allows the expressions and characteristics to be read with greater accuracy.

  “This is it.” Legacy’s mind leapt only hours before. Blue had chosen girls with facial symmetry that became obvious when all of the layers were peeled away. With the color gone, the expression of their faces also revealed the same expression, one of determination in ascending degrees. Legacy didn’t need a computer to read the human face, he should have noticed it before, in fact, but the emotional image that each victim presented, the rosy cheeks and the smooth, evenly tanned skin distracted him. He had never looked at the victims like he should have. He should have viewed them as suspects, with an eye towards discerning the detail of their underlying condition and tendencies. It was a mistake that stared him flat in his very contoured face in the reflection of a subway window. He moved onto the train.

  The ratio of the distance between their eyes and mouths was another constant; it was like Blue processed their biometrics along some code that would result in the greatest satisfaction for him. “He’s looking for the perfect girl to break.”

  It’s no wonder that they all were considered beautiful, symmetry is the cornerstone of physical beauty. He gazed out the window at the passing scenery. The crisp air cut around the aerial producing a thin contrail wisp of cloud, meaning that the temperature was near, but not below, freezing. A half hour later Legacy was standing in front of a cut stone façade that hid the ultra modern interior of the Terrace Towers. It was a blend of the colonial outside to appease those prone to be drawn to history and the broadband contemporary style lobby and interior fixtures to satisfy those who prefer looking to the future.

  Eying the graceless contrast, Legacy decided he would feel ill in the very near present. He stepped out of the elevator, a single doorway led away from the top floor lobby. There was only one door leading from the plush marble accented lobby. A small circular plaque on the door read “Tyke Conspiracies,” but it flew out of sight as the man behind the door opened the door farther with a swift kick outward. He wanted both hands free with this visitor, and he wrapped them around Legacy. He carried the faint smell of body odor, tuna and powdered cheese. Tyke surveyed his visitor’s response to his embrace and made the excuse “I’ve been using that new crystal deodorant,” all the while hugging him closer.

  “Use more.” Legacy said simply, knowing that the only way to truly connect with Tyke was to insult him.

  “I do, I mean I will, but now I’m busy helping out this pain in the ass friend who’s got me making two hundred and fifty thousand dollars worth of machinery into a giant Tivo.” His words bounced off of the rough in-wall frames, scattering into the catacombs that were his unfinished penthouse apartment. Some rooms were practically normal, but they stood as enclosed islands of drywall in a vast plane of a metal-framed maze that extended outward until one reached the windows. Those were covered in a dark tint that made even direct sunlight seem strangely cool. Something to do with projector glare, Legacy bet. Banks of data projectors, DLP, DILA and LCD pointed at white tarps that hung stretched where walls should be circling the main “workplace.” This place looked like it was laundry day, every day. The 1.5 hi-gain video screens had the same amount of luminance workspace as one thousand twenty-inch monitors.

  Tyke was the kind of person who jumped from technology to technology, always thinking the kind that he didn’t have was better than the one he did, regardless of chronology. It seemed like a very simple explanation for his spending habits. He could not concentrate on the same project for any length of time; it was practically impossible for him to wake up one day thinking he’d work on the same thing that he did the day before. His sporadic approach would cripple some people, but it motivated him. Tyke would not sleep until he’d finished what he was doing. This led to some interesting weeks of unbounded progress accompanied by humanity-draining insomnia. It was a cocktail of results and pressure that Tyke had perfected.

  He loved fresh challenges, because they made him finish old business. “I built a moat for one of the top three fulfillment companies in the country.” He said with pride, urging Legacy to guess which one.

  “A moat?” Legacy instead replied.

  “Yeah, firewalls are for pussies, when they get me, they get a moat around them – fire never even touches their walls.” He spoke his own terminology as if it were accepted jargon, which Legacy thought is probably how jargon gets accepted in the first place. It comes from people like Tyke.

  “I’ve got about two hours of work left on your instructions, but my questions are: why are we doing this here? Why at all for that matter? Didn’t they bust up their party this morning?” He reached for a pair of wire strippers and went to work on a ribbon of wires on his workstation.

  “If I’m wrong, we’ve wasted an afternoon.” He was proceeding with his plan to choose the next abduction victim. He hadn’t told Wagner, or anyone for that matter, the truth about how the leak of the news story affected Blue’s plans to choose the next girl; it didn’t. Blue was a vain man and he didn’t let anyone tell him what to do. Anyway he had a system that had produced rewards time after time to change it would show weakness, something Blue did not intend to do.

  “I thought you were never wrong.” Tyke chimed in.

  Legacy rubbed his fingers together below his nose, staring intently at the tips of his fingers, into the grooves that confirmed his own singularity. Somewhere in the overlapping whorls and the maze of indented lines was a pathway, all he needed to do was connect it across an infinite pathway to another person, and the one thing he couldn’t do with this vector diagram was miss. He needed to be someone else for the rest of the day right down to the behaviors that most people would say were untraceable and as unique and impossible to copy, like a fingerprint.

  Blue would keep his appointed hours in front of the TV, and that the next girl would be chosen the same as always, despite the leak. The FBI would not interrupt the symmetry of the crimes that Blue was crafting. Nothing had shown him even the slightest trouble, much less the kind of upheaval that would make him change. He didn’t change, people changed for him, bent around his will. He would be sitting in front of those screens tonight and he woul
d be searching for someone with just a little more pride, an identity a little more sure and confident. He was going to be looking for the best possible woman to ruin, otherwise what was the point? He couldn’t imagine that it was a risk. It was like the police had been handed a phone book of the entire country and they were told that the next victim would be chosen from it. No, Blue felt quite safe, and equally secure in his choice because of one simple reason: he had no idea of who it would be.

  Tyke listened to Legacy explain their next step, let all of it soak into his binary world and offered a suggestion. “Why don’t you let me run a biometrics program while you’re watching the feed?”

  “It won’t work, symmetrical faces are going to be all over the television, we watch one after another symmetrical face on TV. Anyway it’s not just symmetry, it’s the expression mapped out across the cheekbones tells a story about the woman, and the story is progressing. There’s no way to put that into a computer.” The only computer that could process it all, Legacy thought, was his own. “I need to get ready.”

  Legacy’s eyes shined with a steely, slightly foreign anger that he kept in check just below the surface. He was beginning to let Blue creep into his consciousness, a cold intrusion to ready him for the choices that were about to be made. Neither mercy nor remorse nor indecision could cloud his view of the faces that were about to parade in front of him.

  Legacy felt the beginning stages of a trance. He asked if the color could be drained out of the video feeds. When Tyke asked why, Legacy could hardly recognize his own voice as he growled, “That’s how I see them.” He kept his eyes straight forward. The images of all six girls appeared in his mind, larger than life, colorless, and motionless – they were nothing less than a vast landscape of human geography.

  He heard Tyke murmur something defensively about taking a lunch break and ordering Chinese food before shutting out the world entirely. His mind was cleared of everything except the details hidden in the chemical specs deposited on glossy paper forming the image of the abducted girls.

  Using the truth ’T’ lines, Legacy set about seeing a progression, as each girl represented a step forward in both physical beauty, strength of character and conviction. Blue was looking for someone with the kind of outward beauty matched with an understanding of exactly who she was, the kind of certainty that would pose the greatest challenge to break. He was a sculptor looking for an image within a slab of the most formidable marble.

  Legacy recognized the desire to push up against his limits. A small part of him coveted the idea of a kind of perfect failure; finding a secret that even he could not coax out of a person. Something so sacred that it wouldn’t be given up to anything or anyone. He’d come across that kind of resolve only once in his career. It was the encounter that had been the only notable “mistake,” on his otherwise perfect record. The speculation at the time the “mistake” came to light was that he was a traitor – as an amusing aside. It was the only time that he’d lied to a superior officer. The army was right about one thing - there was one case where he knew much more about the subject than he told them. But thinking of her missed the point entirely, and before he could get to the point, chopsticks were thrust into his field of view from above.

  Tyke dangled the delicate looking white wood and then waved it in his face like a snake charmer bent on coaxing him out of his dark retreat.

  It was clear Tyke wasn’t certain if there’d be any venom, by the way he jumped back when Legacy’s eyes snapped open. Tyke must have risked the interruption because of the importance of what he had to say.

  “Kelly.” Tyke said pointing to the door and a shapely young woman wearing black tights that disappeared into short red skirt. She held a second bag of food; Tyke learned that ordering four meals meant that they came in two bags. Two bags gave him almost thirty seconds more time seeing Kelly, that calculation includes two bag retrieval trips.

  Legacy managed a reply “How is everything going?” He spoke in a low tone, careful not to be overheard by Kelly.

  “We’re dating,” He could barely contain the joy of the world that had spread across his glowing face. “She’s way out of my league. Kelly, come and meet my – my - “ He stammered suddenly realizing that he had no way of introducing Legacy, ‘my friend’ didn’t really fit, ‘colleague’ was outdated, ‘lover’ was wholly inaccurate – Legacy saw him stalling out and extended his hand.

  “Former instructor, at the Washington Bureau.” His hand enveloped hers and Kelly unconsciously leaned forward, swooning visibly at his chiseled looks that outlined years of experience and steely eyes that dipped down deeply into charcoal complexity underneath.

  Kelly proved to be playful from word one, as she turned to Tyke and said “Oh, my God. Be glad I didn’t meet him first” She said, walking the thin line of teasing. She turned to Tyke, “So you weren’t kidding about the FBI?” Throwing a glance back to Legacy with a wink, “I thought he just wanted to impress me.” The pucker of her thin expressive lips on the word impress was the kind of flirt that she obviously loved laying out there as bait. She knew that Tyke would rise to take it.

  “She’s toying with me. We won’t last. It’s a fling.” He said handing over the money for the food.

  Kelly continued talking to Legacy, unable to take her eyes off him. “That’s his way of dealing with possible future rejection, to preempt it. What he doesn’t know is that his neurotic insecurity attracts my appetite for self sabotage.” Beneath thick black eyeliner, her eyes danced a calculatedly immature, intellectual jig.

  A twirl sent her skirt just above the propriety line, to finish the tease and she was gone. Legacy could feel the insecurity rising in Tyke, which he quickly diffused by saying “I think she likes me.”

  Tyke’s temples throbbed in frustration, and for a moment, after finding the perfect stinging comeback, he discarded it in favor of “I'm going to die alone.”

  “That’s the spirit.” Legacy found that the smell of food gave him an appetite. The afternoon had quickly dissipated and his hunger reminded him of the arrangements he needed to make. “Can I use your phone?”

  Tyke waved him to an antique replica phone mounted on the wall above a small table in the middle of the hallway. Picking it up, Legacy realized that it was not a replica per se; it was an expertly crafted modern forgery of the old cedar box phones that they used in the old west. The coils, wires, springs and casings all put together lovingly from junk and restored authentically to the period.

  He took a moment before raising the earpiece to study the braided black wires leading to the pick up, where the electric impulses would soon become a familiar voice. The fact that Tyke would have such an artful reverence for old technology made Legacy look at him in a different light. Legacy was not the type to bandy about the word ‘genius’ as a reward for excellence. Tyke had always struck Legacy as a genius, but he hadn’t realized until that moment that he was also an artist. The thought breezed through Legacy like the hum of electricity that perhaps all geniuses are artists regardless or their field, because perfection is just a word for immeasurable beauty.

  He felt the strange sensation of wanting to comfort Tyke, “Kelly was testing you, she wanted to see if you can handle more than just “going out” with her. She wants to know if there’s a chance it will be a relationship.”

  “How did I do?” Tyke asked.

  “You failed.” So much for kind words. He caught himself, “But she’ll give you another chance, keep your eyes up. She wants to be everything you think she is.” Legacy dialed one of the few numbers he had memorized.

  “I thought you were bad with emotions.” Tyke had laid out all of the boxes and popped the tops.

  “I’ve had a lot of emotional input recently. Anyway, the beginning stages of a relationship are all about tactics.” He raised the receiver, craning his tall frame to speak.

  Tyke plunged his chopsticks into the nearest box, letting them stick up like miniature standard bearers
proclaiming victory over his internal conflict. He had eaten alone for almost six straight months. Today he would have lunch with a friend.